salesforce | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

Marc Benioff’s five key business questions

There are five key questions every business leader has to answer for their venture to be successful says Salesforce founder Marc Benioff

Probably the best regular session of the annual Dreamforce conference is the final session where Salesforce founders Marc Benioff and Parker Harris answer questions from the attendees.

As with any open microphone session, some of the questions are silly but many highlight frustrations Salesforce’s customers have and some give the opportunity for an insight into Parker and Benioff’s thoughts away from the scripted glitz of the main keynotes.

One questioner asked Benioff and Parker what their advice would be to someone in their position of 16 years ago with a new business.

Forget the tech

“Don’t think about the tools or the technology,” said Harris. “Thing about the problems you can solve. Stay focused and work hard and build a great company.”

While Parker also emphasised a great team is another important element, Benioff flagged an element of luck in building a successful business, “we got the timing right.”

Ultimately though it came down to making the jump from a comfortable, if frustrating, corporate job to a risky startup.

“I remember I was working in a big company for a long time, very unhappy.” Benioff recalled and noted the decision to strike out on your own is very much a personal decision, that can only be done when you are convinced it is time.

The five questions of business

Knowing when that time has arrived comes down to five questions, Benioff believes.

“It all starts with you, you have to get clear about what is it that you really want, what is really important to you, how are you going to get it, how will you know when you’ve got it and what is preventing you from having it.”

“When you can answer all those five questions you’ll have clarity in your direction. The problem with most small businesses – and big businesses – is they can’t answer those questions.”

“If you can answer those questions then you can break out.”

Ultimately Benioff and Parker flag focus as the key individual attribute and being able to focus on answering those five questions is a very good first step to having a successful business.

Reinventing Microsoft in the age of cloud computing

Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella seems genuine in his push for cloud services and alliances, but there’s still a lot of marketing speak wrapped up

“Why does Microsoft exist?” Asked the company’s founder Satya Nadella at the Dreamforce 2015 conference.

Nadella has asked this question before and his answer at the San Francisco event was that Microsoft exists to empower people through technology, something that Bill Gates and Paul Allen envisaged in the mid 1970s when they founded new startup.

To show how he sees Microsoft’s position in the modern workplace, Nadella gave a not completely flawless demonstration of Microsoft’s integration with Salesforce.

The products Nadella pushed were Windows Phone and Windows 10, which he claims to be part of a major change in businesses with data transforming the way we work.

Interestingly, he framed the Windows 10 IoT strategy around endpoint security. While there are millions of vulnerable devices, it’s not clear shipping them with Microsoft’s firmware will resolve the problem.

“What’s the big technology shift? It’s how we use the data.” Nadella proclaimed in laying out how he sees a data culture transforming the places we work.

A Grand Pivot

Microsoft itself is dealing with a cultural transformation with the company shifting across to cloud based subscription services. “The thing that it’s done for us is it’s not a one-for-one move. It’s not like we’re just moving Exchange on premise to Exchange as a Service, it changes the value proposition for the customers.”

Nadella sees those cloud services as an opportunity to sell more products – and add more value – to customers, particularly small businesses.

The CEO’s role

A business’ success relies upon its culture and Nadella sees the role of the CEO as being about curating that culture, “I always ask what it is that defines us.”

Part of that culture is about becoming customer focused which involves thinking outside of one company’s products or silos, “how is our industry going to succeed? It’s going to succeed if we can add value our customers. Our customers are going to make choices that aren’t homogenous.”

Those varied choices are what’s driving Microsoft’s current push into alliances. “If we are going to realise the power of technology, then these partnerships will amplify that,” says Nadella.

While there were nuggets of truth in Nadella’s presentation, there was also a lot of truisms and somewhat meaningless slogans. While Microsoft’s push onto the cloud and into alliances that were once considered unholy might be genuine, it’s hard not to think there’s still a lot of marketing speak wrapped around it.

Managing the data stream

Managing the data deluge is where Salesforce is focusing its efforts in a competitive market

One of the world’s biggest tech events – if not the biggest of the vendor shows – is Dreamforce, Salesforce’s annual spectacular that this this year attracted a 150,000 attendees to San Francisco’s Moscone Center.

Every year sees the company – which now holds the title of the world’s fourth biggest software company – and its CEO, Marc Benioff, defining the direction of the company in the face of a rapidly changing market. Despite being a pioneer in cloud computing, the company is as vulnerable to disruption as anyone else in a rapidly changing marketplace.

This year, the focus is on analytics and automation along with a strong leaning towards the Internet of Things and app development on the Lightning platform they announced last year.

With the Thunder platform, Salesforce is offering a service that allows businesses to connect devices onto their platform where users can build up rules based business automation. One notable part of this is the integration with Microsoft Office 365, another example of Microsoft’s reaching out to previously hostile companies.

For Automation, Salesforce is building upon its RelateIQ acquisition from last year, now branded as SalesforceIQ. The company says “Relationship Intelligence technology that utilizes advanced data science to analyze company relationships and drive actions.”

The Wave analytics service, which was also announced at last year’s Dreamforce, is a key part of the the business automation and IoT services in providing the insights into the data being collected. In many respect, Wave is going to be the glue that holds most of the products being announced this year.

Complementing the Wave, Thunder and SalesforceIQ products is the Lightning platform, again announced last year, that allows users to use the company’s AppCloud to quickly build business applications.

For Salesforce, the direction being laid out from this Dreamforce conference is in making helping customers deal with the masses of data coming into the enterprise. As Tod Neilsen, the company’s Executive Vice President of the App Cloud says, “we’re look at making the data usuable for spreadsheet users.”

As businesses struggle to manage and understand the masses of data flowing into their organisations, this may well be a powerful selling point for Salesforce.

Paul travelled to Dreamforce 2015 in San Francisco as a guest of Salesforce

Towards the zero defect economy

The Internet of Things promises to eliminate defects which is good news for most, but not all, industries

At 2.03 in the morning of July 11, 2012, a Norfolk Southern Railway Company freight train derailed just inside the city limits of Columbus, Ohio.

The resulting crash and fire caused over a hundred people to be evacuated, resulted in over a million dollars in damages and created massive disruption throughout the US rail network.

Could accidents like this be avoided by the Internet of Things? Sham Chotai, the Chief Technical Officer of GE Software, believes applying sensor technology to locomotives can detect conditions like defective rails and save US railway operators around a billion dollars a year in costs.

“We decided to put the technology directly on the locomotive,” says Chotai in describing the problem facing railroad operators in scheduling track inspections. “We found we were mapping the entire railway network, and we were mapping anything that touched the track such as insulated joins and wayside equipment.”

This improvement in reliability and its benefits to business is something flagged by then Salesforce Vice President Peter Coffee in an interview with Decoding the New Economy in 2013.

“You can proactively reach out to a customer and say ‘you probably haven’t noticed anything but we’d like to come around and do a little calibration on your device any time in the next three days at your convenience.'”

“That’s not service, that’s customer care. That’s positive brand equity creation,” Coffee says.

Reducing defects isn’t just good for brands, it also promises to save lives as Cisco illustrated at an Australian event focused on road safety.

Transport for New South Wales engineer John Wall explained how smarter car technologies, intelligent user interfaces and roadside communications all bring the potential of dramatically reducing, if not eliminating, the road toll.

Should it turn out the IoT can radically reduce defects and accidents it won’t be good news for all industries as John Rice, GE’s Global Head of Operations, pointed out last year in observing how intelligent machines will eliminate the break-fix model of business.

“We grew up in companies with a break fix mentality,” Rice says. “We sold you equipment and if it broke, you paid us more money to come and fix it.”

“Your dilemma was our profit opportunity,” Rice pointed out. Now, he says engineering industry shares risks with their customers and the break-fix business is no longer the profit centre it was.

A zero defect economy is good news for customers and people, but for suppliers and service industries based upon fixing problems it means a massive change to business.

Shifting the cloud business model

Just as the cloud vendors disrupted the software market, they themselves face shifting business models

“What’s the biggest risk to your business?” was one of the questions asked of Netsuite CEO Zack Nelson during a post keynote discussion at the Suiteworld event in San Jose yesterday.

Nelson’s response was the shift to transaction based businesses and cited cloud based human resources company Zenefits as an example.

The transactions model can work two ways with either a fee being charged for each transaction – something that data analytics Splunk does – or Zenefit’s model of taking third party commissions.

A commission driven business

Zenefits doesn’t charge for its software instead making money from commissions paid by companies they refer users to. When a client needs workplace insurance or a new benefits package, the service gets a fee from the provider.

Investors love the idea with the company yesterday raising $500 million in a round that values the business at $4.5 billion dollars after just two years since being founded.

Regulators however don’t like its less than transparent commissions with the service in trouble in a number of US states and it’s clear to see how such a revenue model would hit problems in countries with strong disclosure rules.

Both of the transaction models present a threat to current cloud computing software businesses such as Netsuite and Salesforce that charge fixed license fees based on the number of users and the features they want. Both Splunk and Zenefits on the other hand give their software away.

Disrupted disrupters

Just as the cloud providers’ licensing model disrupted the traditional massive negotiated contracts for enterprise software and the fixed cost box model for small business, the online companies themselves might be facing their own disruption to the way they make money.

For executives like Zach Nelson, shifting from one lucrative model to another more uncertain revenue source will be something keeping them awake for a while longer.

Connecting people to spaces

Smartphones, beacons and smart software are the key to future retail success believes Proximity Insight’s Steve Orell

Beacon technologies are one of the hottest items in the Internet of Things with retailers, sports stadiums and hotels looking at how they can use these devices to improve their operations and customer experiences.

At Dreamforce 2014 Proximity Insight’s Steve Orell spoke on the event’s wearable panel about how their service plugs into beacon technology and customer service.

Proximity Insight was born out of the 2013 Dreamforce Hackathon where Orell and his team were finalists. From that, the company set up operations in New York with a focus on customer relationship management in the retail industry.

Retail isn’t the only the field that Orell sees for Proximity Insight with the hotel and casino industries as being other targets.

“With the hotel, why check-in? Why not walk in and let your smartphone do it for you?” Orell asks.

“It’s all about making live so much more seamless and slick,” Orell adds. “There’s opportunities in every sector.”

For businesses looking at rolling out beacon technologies the key is to be adding value to enhance the customer experience, Orell believes.

“You have to be delivering something to the customer beyond tracking them, it’s about making the whole retail or hospitality experience better. It has to benefit the customer.”

With beacon technologies now becoming common and the supporting hardware being built into all smartphones, we can expect to see more applications coming onto the market. It’s worth considering how your business can use them to enhance the customer experience.

Paul travelled to Dreamforce 2014 as a guest of Salesforce

Salesforce faces the end of the database era

Cloud CRM giant Salesforce faces a challenge as searching unstructured data and analytics companies like Splunk change the business model.

Last week we looked at the way we organise information is changing in the face of exploding data volumes.

One of the consequences of the data explosion is that structured databases are beginning to struggle as information sources and business needs are becoming more diverse.

Yesterday, cloud Customer Relationship Management company Salesforce announced their Wave analytics product which the company says “with its schema-free architecture, data no longer has to be pre-sorted or organized in some narrowly defined manner before it can be analyzed.”

The end of the database era

Salesforce’s move is interesting for a company whose success has been based upon structured databases to run its CRM and other services.

What the company’s move could be interpreted that the age of the database is over; that organising data is a fool’s errand as it becomes harder to sort and categorise the information pouring into businesses.

This was the theme at the previous week’s Splunk conference in Las Vegas where the company’s CTO, Todd Papaioannou, told Decoding The New Economy how the world is moving away from structured databases.

“We’re going through a sea change in the analytics space,” Papaioannou said. “What characterised the last thirty years was what I call the ‘schema write’ era; big databases that have a schema where you have to load the data into that schema then transform before you can ask questions of it.”

Breaking the structure

The key with programs like Salesforce and other database driven products like SAP and Oracle is that both the data structures — the schema — and the questions are largely pre-configured. With the unstructured model it’s Google-like queries on the stored data that matters.

For companies like Salesforce this means a fundamental change to their underlying product and possibly their business models as well.

It may well be that Salesforce, a company that defined itself by the ‘No Software’ slogan is now being challenged by the No Database era.

Paul travelled to San Francisco and Las Vegas as a guest of Salesforce and Splunk respectively

Knocking at Silicon Valley’s door

Chasing the Silicon Valley model may be a mistake for cities trying to become modern industrial hubs

In opening Salesforce’s new London office yesterday, former BT CEO Lord Livingston described the city as “knocking at the door of Silicon Valley.”

Judging from the Computing UK article that description hasn’t impressed the rest of the British tech community as it confirms in their minds there is, as usual, too much focus on the capital and Livingston’s view also raises the question of whether London really wants to be another Silicon Valley.

Like all global industrial hubs Silicon Valley the result of a series of happy coincidences; massive defense spending, determined educators, clever inventors and savvy entrepreneurs all finding themselves in the same place at the same time.

Trying to replicate the factors that turned the region into the late Twentieth Century’s centre of technology is almost impossible – even the United States couldn’t afford the massive defense spending over the fifty years from 1941 that underpinned the Valley’s development.

Apart from the spending; the culture, economy, geography, markets and workforce of Silicon Valley are very different to that of London’s.

This not to say London doesn’t have advantages over Silicon Valley; access to Europe and relatively easy immigration policies make Britain a very attractive location for tech businesses. If the local startup community can tap The City’s banking resources then London could well be the next global hub.

If London is the next global tech centre – history will tell – it will almost certainly be very different to Silicon Valley.

Strangely, the event Lord Livingston was speaking at reflects how the Californian tech sector is evolving; Salesforce is a San Francisco company and represents a shift in the last five years from the suburbia of San Jose and Palo Alto to the quirky city life of SoMa and the Tenderloin.

At the same time Silicon Valley itself is evolving into something different, just as it did in the 1990s with the switch from microprocessor manufacturing to software development.

That shift illustrates the risks of trying to imitate one industrial hub; by the time you’ve build your replica, the original has moved on.

If you spent your life trying to knock on the door of heroes you want to imitate, it would be shame to finally make it only to find they’ve moved.

Evangelism and the makers’ movement

Salesforce’s Reid Carlberg talks tech Evangelism, the Internet of Things and the Makers’ Movement

The latest Decoding the New Economy interview is with Salesforce’s Reid Carlberg.

During the interview with Reid we cover how the Internet of Things and big data is changing business and society along with the journey to becoming a software company’s evangelist.

Reid has a fascinating story to tell about how the makers’ movement is evolving as big data and the internet of things develops.

The interview is an insight into a winding career path and how Big Data and the Internet of Things is changing business and society.

Customer service is no longer a department

Customer service needs to pervasive through modern organisations says Salesforce’s Alex Bard

When it comes to customer service businesses, Alex Bard calls himself a ‘career entrepreneur’, having founded four startups in the field since the mid 1990s.

In 2011 he sold his most recent business, Assist.ly, to Salesforce and became the company’s Vice President for Service Cloud and the Desk.com customer service offerings.

Bard tolds Decoding the New Economy last week how social media and Big Data are radically changing how organisations respond to the needs of their clients.

“I’ve been in the industry for twenty years and I’ve never been excited as I am now,” Bard says. “The real transformational things that’s happening now are these revolutions – the social revolution, the mobile revolution, the connected revolution.”

The philosophy of customer service

“What they’re really driving is this idea that customer service is no longer a department, it’s a philosophy.”

“It’s a philosophy that has to permeate throughout the organisation. Everybody in the company has a role in support. It’s not just about a call centre or a contact centre or even an engagement center which is what these things are called today.”

“I really don’t like the word ‘centre’ because I really fundamentally believe that everbody in that company has to interact with customers, has to engage and has to the information – no matter they are – about that customer to provide context.”

Abolishing the service visit

With the Internet of Things, Bard sees GE’s social media connected jet engine as illustrating the future of customer service where smart machines improve customer service.

“They’re going to capture more data in one year than in their entire 96 year history prior,” says Bard. “With that data they’ll be able to analyse and do things on behalf of that product or service that’ll reduce the number of issues.”

“Because the best service of all is one that doesn’t have to happen.”

In this respect, Bard is endorsing the views of his college Peter Coffee who told Decoding the New Economy last year that the internet of machines may well abolish the service visit.

“Connecting devices is an extraordinary thing,” says Coffee. “It takes things that we used to think we understood and turns them inside out.”

“If you are working with connected products you can identify behaviours across the entire population of those products long before they become gross enough to bother the customer.”

For Alex Bard, the customer service evolution has followed his own entrepreneurial career having evolved from being personal computer based in the 1990s to today’s industry that relies on cloud computing, big data and social media technologies.

As these technologies roll out across industry, businesses who adopt the customer service philosophy Bard describes are much more likely to adapt to the disruptions we’re seeing across the economy. Changing corporate cultures is one of the great tasks ahead for modern executives.

Driving out inefficiencies

Inefficiencies are being squeezed out of business and corporations are going to have to adapt, warns the World Economic Forum.

“We’re driving inefficiencies out of every single facet of life,” AT&T CEO Randall L. Stephenson told The World Economic Forum’s New Digital Context panel last month.

The CEO panel at the Davos forum, which included Yahoo!’s Marissa Mayer, Salesforce’s Mac Benioff, Cisco’s John Chambers and Gavin Patterson of BT discussed how corporations of all sizes are being affected by rapid market changes.

“All this bandwidth, all these connected devices, are as disruptive as anything this society has ever seen,” Stephenson said.

“Companies that aren’t moving and driving the new technologies are companies that don’t stay alive.”

Stephenson’s view was supported by Cisco CEO John Chambers, “if you look at big companies only a third of us will exist in a meaningful way in two decades.”

Chambers cited Cisco’s experience from the past two decades to illustrate how business is rapidly changing, “my competitors from fifteen, twenty years ago – none of them exist or they’ve exited. From ten to fifteen years ago only one exists, from five to ten years ago only a few.”

“If you don’t disrupt, you get left behind,” warned Chambers.

Chambers’ advice to managers is that teams have to be empowered and encouraged to take risks and learn from failures, advice endorsed by Yahoo!’s Marissa Mayer.

“The best thing you can an executive can do is play defense, not offense. Get out everybody out of the way and set up an evironment where they can really run and make a difference.”

Yahoo!’s Marissa Mayer endorsed the change, describing a much flatter organization; “we try and run things really flat, really transparent.”

That flat organisation is really the biggest risk to many executives in staid, safe organisations; it means fewer middle managers as the workplace is increasingly automated.

As businesses adopt new technologies, the need for Executive Vice Presidents or Group General Managers is eliminated – along with the armies of assistants and underlings required to help these folk in their roles.

In the past, those layers of management have isolated senior executives from their customers which Salesforce’s Marc Benioff is a luxury companies can’t afford in the current marketplace, “everything is going faster, companies have to change faster.”

“Today if you’re not listening to your customers more deeply than ever before and not reacting to them more rapidly than every before,then you are probably making a mistake,” warns Benioff.

Most of those in the room at WEF were the world’s top executives and government officials, how many of them take note of how business is changing will become clear in the very near future.

There’s also a warning for those government leaders on how employment and government services are going change in the near future which a lesson that needs to be heeded as policies are developed.

Now’s the time for every manager, business owner or executive to look at the inefficiencies in their workplace and whether it can be eliminated either through technology or business restructuring. It may well save you from being identified as an inefficiency yourself.

Steam train image courtesy of Gabriel77 through sxc.hu

Microsoft’s business fightback

Microsoft stake their place in the CRM market. How will this affect companies like Salesforce?

Yesterday a series of vendor briefings showed how Microsoft is fighting back in the enterprise computing market and taking on upstarts like Salesforce in the CRM and business analytics markets.

Microsoft’s briefing presented a series of happy customers – including Colliers International, Servcorp and Metricon Homes – describing how they had deployed the Microsoft Dynamics product.

All the businesses at the Microsoft event said how it fitted into their existing business IT infrastructure. All were Windows shops running Exchange and Sharepoint.

This installed base illustrates Microsoft’s strength in the Enterprise marketplace along with its partner network of resellers and integrators.

Microsoft’s partner network was illustrated at HP’s Next Generation of Information Workers briefing where the company’s workplace of the future vision is very much a Windows service, even the layout is a replica of the Window 8 tiled layout.

The Next Generation of Information Workers product is largely built over Microsoft’s Sharepoint and HP’s own Trim product which again shows how legacy providers are leveraging their established technology.

Whether this is enough to hold off the likes of Salesforce and other cloud based services remains to be seen. Being Windows-centric is particularly tough at a time when many employees bringing their own Apple iPads and Android smartphones to work.

Microsoft’s awareness of its position was shown in the billing of the briefing where the invite billed the session as showing how Microsoft competes with Salesforce.

That competition is manifesting itself with both Salesforce and Microsoft aggressively acquiring social, analytics and marketing platforms to compliment their CRM products.

If the competition was just a matter of size there would be little contest as Microsoft’s $290 billion stock market capitalisation is more than ten times bigger that of Salesforce’s.

But it isn’t just a matter of size. Microsoft are have a legacy business to protect while disruptors like Salesforce aren’t encumbered by older desktop and server products.

What is clear though is that Microsoft is gearing to fight for these markets.